IBM, with a big boost from researchers at its campus in Research Triangle Park, set a record of patents in a single year with 5,896 in 2010. Big Blue has taken the top spot for intellectual property development for 18 straight years, according to IFI Claims Patent Services... and local IBMers here at Research Triangle Park, NC, contributed to over 500 of those patents!

The game of Jeopardy! makes great demands on its players – from the range of topical knowledge covered to the nuances in language employed in the clues. Can the analytical power of a computer system – normally accustomed to executing precise requests – overcome these obstacles? View Watson during the sparring matches leading up to the final championship match... and take a peak behind the scenes of the making of a Jeopardy champion!

Recently I was exploring lazy load techniques as a method to improve perceived page load times. There are a number of methods to lazy load web artifacts, which enable a web developer to delay or load page elements on demand. Typically these methods are used to control and prioritize the rendering of primary web page elements to the benefit of the overall user experience. My interest was focused on loading page artifacts, including intelligently and selectively storing web page Images. As part of my research, I thought it might be... [More]

You have likely seen Quick Response codes (QR codes) popping up on packages, magazine pages, even some web pages, and in 2011, you are going to be seeing a lot more of them. Quick Response codes are poised to achieve widespread
adoption this year, and for some very obvious reasons. We all want
information... we even demand it! And a QR code provides it, through
immediate access to what’s relevant about the artifact it represents. And with the advent
of smart phones, we all carry the required tool to interpret all that... [More]

In a previous blog post , I discussed using Google Charts to quickly and efficiently create QR code images. A QR code or Quick Response code is a two-dimensional bar-code that is readable by QR bar-code
readers and smart phones. You can use QR codes to represent display text , open a URL, or compose an email or SMS. Quick Response codes are also known
as hardlinks or physical world hyperlinks , and can store
up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters of arbitrary text. As I explored the Google Chart API for generating QR code... [More]

As in past conferences, Impact2011 offers a web based social aggregator , which pulls together conversations and artifacts from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and other social destinations, into a single web page. While this page is available to mobile devices, it does not offer an optimal mobile experience. A few of us here at developerWorks thought it would be a cool project to offer an aggregator that is optimized for viewing on a mobile device. Rather than invest in the creation of multiple native device applications, we decided to... [More]

Are you a hot shot Lotus or WebSphere developer? A System z or Power Systems guru? Do you bleed yellow? Do you blog, author articles, are active in forums, or in general a strong advocate of IBM capabilities? Do you know someone who is? Nominations are open for you or a worthy candidate you may know! Just what is a IBM Champion, and what does it take to be one? What is a IBM Champion? The IBM Champion program recognizes exceptional contributors to the technical community, who are
non-IBMers that work alongside IBM to build... [More]

While the current web browser support matrix has not fully caught up with the promise of the HTML5 Form specification, we are seeing additional adoption of various HTML5 Form elements in some recent browser deployments. This post will cover a few basic Form elements and visual treatments, to demonstrate how simple and effective the new Form validators are going to be. At one time or another, all of us have likely relied on Javascript to validate Form input. While client side Form validation is not a replacement for bullet proof... [More]

Shadow effects have always been very cool. What started out as Photoshop junkies attaching them to background images is now in the domain of any programmer, thanks to CSS!. The CSS3 box-shadow property allows designers and developers to easily implement drop shadows on any boxed elements. You can specify values for size, color, offset, and blur. By casting a drop shadow from a image, you can add dimension without the need to create specialized web images. Let’s explore how to create a basic outer shadow, and then dive into a neat... [More]

Having developed a Minimal Theme adaptive blog template for our developerWorks community blogs, I thought I would
share an insiders view on both customizing the template, and hints and tips on creating blog posts to maximize this templates capabilities. For an overview of the template features, and instructions on applying this template to your blog, please visit my existing blog post: New blog template for developerWorks . First, a quick overview of the Minimal Theme: In addition to a number of new widgets that our
bloggers and their... [More]